The hunter becoming the hunted paradox

As a human resource director, her job description included Human Resource development, planning, sourcing, recruiting and other related attributes of HR managers. Ironically, she chaired interview panels during the recruitment process to ensure value for money by selecting the most competent and qualified candidate for her organisation! But in actual sense she was blighting other people’s career through her incompetence and poor sense of judgment because she was unqualified for her position. Ms Bebey Ugirase had used her supposed qualifications, supported by fake certificates, to obtain a job as Human Resource Manager in one of the prestigious international NGOs operating in the country. She occupied this position for some years until recently when her deception was uncovered and the long arm of the law caught up with her. She is now behind bars. She is the latest victim to be added on the list of people who have been arrested due to fake or forged academic qualifications. Though it’s an open secret that there could be more pathological professional liars in responsible positions with forged academic qualifications (as deduced from many precedents of this vice), Ms Ugirase’s experience was one of its kind. Whereas the normal practice is that most bicupuris (forged academic certificates) originate from foreign countries purportedly from some of the leading universities and colleges, Ugirase took a courageous step and forged hers from one of our own-School of Finance and Banking! To cut the long story short, this elegant lady forged the paper, obtained employment and all has been well until recently when the tide turned against her and she was arrested and locked up. However, the question and concerns of forged academic qualifications in the country is bigger than Ugirase’s case and if not countered it will lead to social stress in terms of increased unemployment rates and other related social evils since it’s easy to buy a degree certificate on the streets! The resultant and net effect is that we shall have very many unemployed “professionals” with no actual qualifications and skills. This evil could be one of the causes why our “skilled or qualified” labour force is still low rated and employers continue to complain of employees who do not perform! In education, there is no small cheating and there are no short cuts, any level you jump will have a negative effect in terms of skills and knowledge acquisition. Three common practices of faking certificates are; candidates failing at senior six and obtain forged certificates to join universities, faking university degree certificates like in this particular case as described above and the last one is where people jump levels and this is common through private candidate centers. I was talking with a friend who gave me a shocking account of a friend of his whose job was to ferry forged certificates from Uganda to Rwanda and his business boomed for some time until authorities became aware unfortunately he escaped the arrest. He escaped and went back to Uganda and stopped the practice altogether, but the damage was already done- he flooded the market with lots of forged papers! Perhaps, this could have been one of the sources, but there could be many more unknown sources out there! My opinion would be that relevant authorities need to intervene by launching an audit and comprehensive investigation to ascertain authenticity of qualifications. Since academic cheating is a crime like other crimes, police should intervene in full force to handle and crack-down academic dishonesty wherever and whenever a suspicion is raised. Technology has simplified life in all aspects, some of the certificates can be validated by simply logging in the registration number on the university website - at least I know this service is available online from Makerere University website at (www.ar.mak.ac.ug). May be other universities should emulate this example; this could be one step in curbing this academic dishonesty. There are number of characteristics of people with forged qualifications. They hardly talk about their University/ College experience. In most cases, learned people like reminiscing their University days. Of recent I was having a casual talk with one of the senior citizens in this country and I was so impressed the way he narrated his first experience when he joined Makerere University way back in 1974! So, one of the leading clues of people who have shortchanged their education cycle is that they never refer to it! As I conclude my article to beat my editor’s deadline, to Ms Ugirase, I will say that happiness is not a reward but a consequence and suffering is not a punishment but a result, you carefully constructed a sham of your life and you have paid the price. On the other hand, you are lucky if you are reading this article and seated on the faked certificates it’s time to liberate yourself and go back to school! It could have been circumstantial that you forged that certificate to earn a living, but it’s time to do the right thing because you can’t leave a lie forever! The writer is an educationist, author and publisher.